Hey All,
So here’s the deal, I have an old HP laptop I am in the process of resetting and setting up wiping and setting up as my ~8yo nephew’s first computer. He played his first PC game sitting on my lap and I am determined to fuel his budding interest in computers as much as possible. He has an iPad from his parents and has been attending a ‘code ninjas’ camp for kids his age and has been loving it. So for Christmas this year I asked his parents and they’re comfortable with him having his own, supervised, system.
I was planning to start with just a blank slate on the machine with a parent account and then a child account for him. Obviously the parental controls will be in place with his parents getting a crash course in anything they don’t already know how to use(they’re tech literate so I’m not worried about that). But they’re not CS people and I’m only barely self taught over the years.
I have this vision of giving him a sandbox with enough toys and tools (as much FOSS as possible) that he can safely play around and build/make things on his own. So here’s where my question for y’all comes in, what are your recommendations for a budding computer scientist/programmer’s first Windows machine? And just to head it off at the pass, no, we can’t go the Linux route yet. I don’t have the experience/expertise to support a system like that remotely and his parents have even less. I’m also wondering if there are any tutorials or resources I could load onto the machine that he can /watch learn from without an internet connection?
And lastly I’m wondering if anyone has any advice for encouraging him to push the boundaries of the parental controls and locks on the system. Obviously not in a way that undermines his parents authority. But I want to encourage that sense of almost devious exploration that encourages even just users to truly analyze and understand the limitations and cracks in systems they’re dropped into. To give a probably horribly outdated example from my past: figuring out how to bypass the proxy service the school network used to access browser game websites.
- Currently only on mobile and memmy seems to be having some trouble properly displaying comments and posting my replies. I’m seeing things in my inbox but am only able to see my comment on the actual post. Will respond to people once I’m home and can access the actual site. Thanks for all the advice so far, keep it coming!
So here’s the deal, I have an old HP laptop I am in the process of resetting and setting up as my ~8yo nephew’s first computer.
Big mistake. It reinstalls all the bloatware and sometimes it can even end up bricking your Windows install. Always clean install.
Obviously the parental controls will be in place with his parents getting a crash course in anything they don’t already know how to use(they’re tech literate so I’m not worried about that).
Just in case you decide to use the Microsoft parental controls. It automatically blocks Firefox so you have to unblock it manually.
So here’s where my question for y’all comes in, what are your recommendations for a budding computer scientist/programmer’s first Windows machine?
Replace the HDD with a 512 GB SATA SSD, install 8 GBs of RAM and it will probably last more
Replace the HDD with a 512 GB SATA SSD, install 8 GBs of RAM and it will probably last more
nah, it would seem more magical when in 4 years his great uncle magically upgrades his pc to be light years faster. Had this experience as a kid, totally worth it.
So far this is what I’m planning to have pre-installed for him:
- 7Zip
- VLC
- GIMP
- InkScape
- Audacity
- LibreOffice
- Firefox
- Okular
- Scratch
Make sure to install uBlock Origin when you install FF. It’s unlikely your nephew can click on ads believing there is a virus but do it, to be safe
If he uses YouTube at all, please consider using FreeTube instead. It’s in all the major repos.
Edit: windows builds too on their website.
Maybe Stellarium? It’s an immersive astronomy teaching tool. To encourage scientific curiosity?
Definitely Notepad++. If he graduates to programming in code rather than Scratch blocks, it’ll be a useful editor with its syntax highlighting.
Oooh Stellarium and Celestia! Good call. I was thinking I’d wait and install once he actually gets closer to that point. Hes still just starting out so I don’t wanna overload him with options.
Blender is also a good one if he’s into making games. It’s super difficult to learn but I spent hours and hours trying when I was younger
Consider adding a text editor/IDE (just don’t push (neo)vi(m) or emacs on him, I don’t think it’s a good idea for a kid) because once he moves on from scratch to pretty much anything else, he will need a text editor/IDE. Also consider if he wants to learn the terminal, and then you can pick any extra software/tools/utilities accordingly.
My thought was to wait a bit for him to get through scratch and block based stuff and then introduce him to actual text editors and IDEs once his actual education gets closer to that stuff.
mmm, I disagree. Never underestimate the power of curiosity. Have it there already installed so the kid can get curious.
In regards to gaming, I would dissuade from modern games. Not quite yet. Some are fine I’m sure but honestly they don’t need to experience Fortnite yet if they haven’t.
Get a rotation of emulated consoles going. NES/SNES, others around the generation. So many games that lay out the foundation of not only gaming today but it quickly translates to a modernized format but it can be harder going back. So many smart puzzle games made for ingenuity and just plain fun.
Earthworm Jim, Buddy’s World, the Batman and Spider-Man and Star Wars sidescrollers among a few.
I was probably about 8 when I had access to an old Hitachi laptop with hundreds of emulated NES/SNES games and I have such fond memories. Other than Worms 2, I don’t remember much of the stuff I did with that laptop but it was my gaming machine for a long time.
I even have some usb snes controllers…
Do it! I never did and it was ancient emulation so I didn’t even know how to change the controls back then. I was using arrow keys and PGUP/PGDN keys for A/B!
From there emulation can act as a gateway to learning about software.
windows? kid’s going to break that. might teach him a few things lol.
I second the edu-based distro idea.
I can recommend https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/ and a Raspberry Pi with Raspberry Pi OS. That should set them up for a lifelong journey of learning and excitement and bring enough tools to experience everything without relying on Windows which spies on them.
Really really please install gnulinux on that child’s computer. He will be grateful for life. If you install windows he might not hate it but he’ll never know what he missed. He will get used to that and will be hard for him in the future to get out of the windows ecosystem. my humble experience installing hundreds of Linux systems: childrenand young are the best adopters. You can do it and ask for help here or on other channels if needed. Maybe go for Linux mint Debian edition.
Your focusshould be on something that catches his interest. Depending on the child I’d say choose stuff that is easily to learn but has some depth too it. If you want to invest some time do some projects with him, to give easy goals to achieve and continue. Be the rabbit hole.
Don’t do anything Linux or FOSS to start. Get him into Minecraft, Roblox, and fortnite. All run best on Windows and all have major modding tools that get you results immediately.
Ignore anyone telling you to use Linux or FOSS tools that don’t have an industry standard grip. blender and obs are fine but if someone is suggesting vim or emacs over visual studio code or notepad, they don’t understand kids or ease of use. Overall windows is where you want to be. Maybe specifically windows 10.
Overall I’d aim for games and game development with game maker or something more simple like osmo. This will show practical creative use cases for complex math. It will get them interested in files and formats. Hell, I’d throw them some indie games that don’t pack their files so he can just replace them and get interesting results.
Ignore anyone telling you to use Linux or FOSS tools that don’t have an industry standard grip. blender and obs are fine but if someone is suggesting vim or emacs over visual studio code or notepad, they don’t understand kids or ease of use.
Or you can just use tools which are not on the CLI. My mom uses Linux and she’s 60, I guess a child can easily use Linux. In fact, I’m teaching a few dozen kids to learn scratch and Python on a Raspberry Pi 4 with Raspberry Pi OS and they manage just fine.
Please get a grip on the industry standard of teaching people. They’re even doing Minecraft development on these things (although we compile externally).
For making games I recommend the Thonny IDE and Scratch as a start. They both work on Linux. Godot also works fine on Linux if they want to continue that route.
You can do all that with Windows aswell but for teaching our group of teachers found out that it just gets in the way of doing things when updates break stuff and you can’t simply fix it by copying files around.
Yeah you aren’t doing bedrock on Linux. 8 have insights into industry standards and teaching kids. Also just because it “works fine on Linux” doesn’t mean it works best on Linux.
For me this answer is biased. I am a technology teacher and father of five. Had great experience with Linux. Get them on the free ecosystem with no barriers! That’s the best educational environment. Kturtle, gcompris. Krita. Inkscape. Scratch. Godot. Freecad. Gimp. Libresprite/Aseprite. More than enough to keep you busy. I grew up with DOS. The best fuel for me learning computing was trying to make games run. Nowadays everything tries to be so easy and simple and that’s great but sometimes it has an educational drawback. Linux is so much easier for kids than for adults who are already used to windows/Mac. Edit: you could also start with i3wm. That’s what I did with my kids. Of course, the hard part of that is not them learning, but you first learning it so you can show it to them. Have an eye on that and adjust difficulty depending on your time for this project. If you don’t have that much time and willingness to learn yourself, just go KDE plasma or other.
Anything on Windows is much easier than on Linux which is why most companies and people prefer operating systems that consider user experience over Linux distros.
My experience is different. I tend to think the billions of dollars spent by microsoft on marketing and lobbies give them some advantage. And a lot of companies use linux more than windows. But of course it depends on your historical experience and choices.
As desktop environments, less companies use Linux. That’s the context we are already talking about. We aren’t talking about random servers or random devices.
Yeah less use Linux. But, even with all of Microsoft lobbies and marketing, a bunch do. For example in the country where I live, the desktop computers of the main bus transport and courier company all use Suse linux. In a school where I worked, all computers also had Linux. It really makes sense in educational contexts.
Literally every school in my area uses andn teaches windows or mac. Never Linux. I’m in Seattle. Even the charter schools use Windows or Mac. I don’t know if a single business, school, government service, etc that uses Linux as their main desktop environment. Maybe it makes sense to do so in your country but I don’t see how it would make sense in mine. Windows and Mac both heavily sponsor American schools.
Yeah that’s a sad situation. I suppose you already know about the dangers for the future of our children of not having access to software code and one big company having control over our devices and surveillance capitalism and blah blah blah so I won’t waste your time with that again. Every context is different, every mind is different. Hope you succeed in giving this child what will be best for his future. Good luck and congratulations for your motivation!
I know you said you don’t want Linux suggestions, but I’ll be that person and suggest a Linux distro anyway, in case you ever change your mind.
Ubermix is a Ubuntu-based distro (meaning there’s a ton of documentation and support) built with education in mind. They also have a nifty feature to easily recover your system from boot if you do manage to bork the system.
If your goal is to help your nephew get good at computer, fixing various broken systems over the years taught me probably most of what I know about how computers work. I wasn’t much older than your nephew the first time I made the family PC unbootable (I was trying to “downgrade” our “Vista-capable” PC to Windows XP, apologies if this anecdote makes anyone feel old). It took me a couple of days to get it running again after searching through YouTube and forum posts, but that rushing sense of accomplishment when it finally booted up to the bucolic green hills of the Bliss wallpaper got me hooked on troubleshooting and tinkering with technology for life.
Either way, best of luck to you and your nephew, it’s really cool that he has someone supporting him in his interests! You’re good people.
Appreciate the suggestion and will remember it for the future. We’re going to be sticking with windows for the time being unfortunately since I can only offer remote support and ain’t no way do I have the time and ability to do that for Linux. But thanks again!
And yeah that makes me feel old, I didnt have YouTube the first time I borked the home PC…
